But before your events begin, it’s critical to take a look at the way you register people and take and sell tickets. Taking tickets for events online through your website is a wonderful solution for both events that incur a fee and those that do not.

“TicketU has made it easier for our members to invite guests, which helps with our outreach to those who may not have a church background,” says Candy Phillips, church hostess for Bellevue Baptist Church. “Last year, our Easter Memphis Passion Play drew more than 25,000 people. Although we still sell tickets at our box office, more than 50 percent of the tickets we sell are sold through online ticketing.”

With Easter just around the corner, reserving seats for the Easter services, purchasing tickets for the annual Easter egg hunt, or reserving box seats for the Easter Musical online just might be the way to go for your church. TicketU is an excellent solution that can turn your administrative nightmare and into a springtime dream.

Sign up to use TicketU for your online ticket sales by April 1, 2010, and receive your first 300 tickets free (a $300 value).

To learn more about how TicketU can simply the way you sell online tickets and to lock in your 300 free tickets, click here or call 866-709-7420 today!

Click on the links below to read more about churches that have successfully implemented TicketU for outreach:

• Bellevue Church’s Easter Outreach Success
• Online ticketing for Christmas production increases outreach
• First Baptist Church eases the manpower burden on church volunteers with TicketU

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Digital Church is a collection of web-based services that LifeWay endorses. LifeWay launched the new Web portal as a way to give ministry leaders access, in one place, to a full range of resources, services and solutions that are easy to use and come from trusted resource providers.

In order to select trusted resource provides featured on Digital Church, LifeWay thoroughly researched technology products and services targeted to churches and ministries. Based on this careful, deliberate approach, LifeWay selected solutions to share with those they serve through the Digital Church Web portal.  And, we at ServiceU are so honored that Lifeway selected TransactU as their recommended source for online event registrations, payments and donations.

We are really excited to be working with LifeWay to help churches utilize technology to further their mission. LifeWay’s vision for the Digital Church aligns perfectly with our mission to make “serving others simplified.” Our goal is to bring technological advances to churches and ministries in easy-to-use software tools. Digital Church is a great resource for church leaders who are looking for those software tools that are best suited for their ministries, and we are truly honored that TransactU has been selected as a recommended resource. 

As you may know, TransactU™, is our software that equips churches to set up online giving and event registration. We are one of the few companies in compliance with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards as a Level 1 Service Provider – meaning clients can have the highest degree of confidence in the security of their credit card information when making online purchases or donations.

To learn more, read the news release announcing the launch of the Digital Church initiative, or visit Digital Church.

As always, I appreciate your continued support and patronage of ServiceU.
Tim

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Here are 5 ways that online ticketing can assist your church with outreach:

1. Online ticketing reduces costs and frees up money for outreach
 Online ticketing cuts costs by reducing postage fees to mail tickets. Participants can simply print out their tickets at home. In addition, online ticketing reduces the administrative burden of selling tickets. This releases more financial and personnel resources to utilize in other areas of your ministry.

2. Fewer volunteers in the box office
 Online ticketing can reduce the need to have as many volunteers on-hand to sell tickets. This allows them to help in other ways, including meeting and greeting the guests.

3. Follow up
Another great aspect of using online ticketing for outreach is the follow up capabilities your organization has once someone has purchased a ticket. With TicketU™, patrons enter their email address when purchasing tickets and check a box if they are interested in other events. This gives churches another way to communicate with people in the future.

4. Reserved seating encourages guest attendance
Reserved seating eliminates the hassles of finding a seat or meeting a friend. This makes guests feel much more comfortable and more likely to attend your event.

5. Flexibility
Many guests may not feel comfortable going to the unfamiliar church office to purchase a ticket. By offering online event ticketing, your guests can order tickets from the comfort of their home.

Learn more about how TicketU can make your church box office management easier—and increase  ticket sales and outreach.

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Why we made these changes
In addition to updating and modernizing the look of the interface, we made these changes to enhance the overall usability of My.ServiceU.com. The improvements to the user interface yield “lighter” pages that will load faster in browsers. These changes will also provide better support for a wider variety of web browsers. Many elements have been improved to provide better readability and usability, including the Home page, Search Events pages, as well as buttons and other graphics throughout the system. This new design will also enable us to provide a better and more consistent display of errors and warnings.
Here’s a look at some of the updates at My.ServiceU.com:
• Smaller, faster pages – Improvements to our interface make pages load faster than before.  In addition, we have significantly reduced the size of each page making faster load times for you!
• Clean, visually appealing pages – You may have noticed the new look for the www.ServiceU.com website. We wanted to bring that fresh, updated modern look to the My.ServiceU.com interface as well. We hope you enjoy the fresh new look.
• New calendar and Home page – The main calendar page has also been updated with new visual styling.  Also, the Home page has been decluttered to make it a much more visually appealing Home page.
• New Popup Calendar - Gone is the old browser popup window for selecting dates in the system.  The new, unobtrusive calendar slides in under the date textbox and allows for fast access to date selection.  It no longer triggers popup blockers or hides behind the current window.  This small change greatly improves usability.
• New Newsletter Editor - One of the greatest improvements in usability is on the newsletter creation page.  We have replaced the editor with more functional, efficient editor.  Unused options have been removed, and the new editor works on all browsers!
• Better browser support – The changes and updates we’ve implemented have allowed us to take a major step toward the site becoming more consistent across all browsers and operating systems.   By implementing current web standards, we will have the ability to use innovative features in new web technologies (CSS3, HTML5) in the future.  The site has been tested with Internet Explorer (6,7,8), Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari.  While the supported browser list hasn’t officially been updated, we hope users of the unsupported browsers will have a much better experience.  While Internet Explorer 6 is still supported, we would encourage users to upgrade to a more secure browser for the best experience possible.   Some visual aspects of the site will not be supported in IE6.

So, what do you think?
 We hope you enjoy and benefit from these changes and updates. We absolutely value your suggestions for improvements and new features. As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions via email at support@serviceu.com.

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While it may feel that the Christmas season has finally wound down, for many churches and organizations that put on an Easter performance or spring production, the holiday “hustle and bustle” is just beginning.

Now is the perfect time to consider TicketU for your online and onsite ticket sales, while you still have a few weeks to go before opening day. This edition of the UNews is dedicated to helping you better understand how TicketU can streamline the entire ticketing process for your staff members and volunteers, while increasing ticket sales and outreach.

For example, have you ever considered the many ways in which online ticketing can help your church with outreach? If not, be sure to read this article: 5 Ways Online Ticketing Helps with Outreach story.

In addition, I’m very pleased with the new and improved My.ServiceU.com interface that we unveiled recently. Now that you’ve had a few weeks to use the new interface, we would appreciate your feedback. Simply send your comments and suggestions to support@serviceu.com. Read more about the enhancements.

Are you interested in winning a ServiceU “Serving Others Simplified” T-shirt? If so, check us out at www.Facebook.com/ServiceU. Each week, we’ll post a question for our “fans.” The question might seek your “tips of the trade,” ask you to share a link to your event, or ask other fun questions to generate an online conversation. Simply post a response, and we’ll select one lucky person (or more) to win a ServiceU T-shirt!

As always, I truly appreciate the opportunity to do business with you and to help your organization serve others.

Sincerely,

Tim

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